Friday, April 12, 2002

I ran across this little site that describes how to use features in all web browsers to dramaticly cut down on the number of ads you see while surfing. Check out How To Block Ads (& Web Bugs) Without Extra Software. Basically you edit your /etc/hosts file (or equivalent) to direct ad sites to 127.0.0.1.

Now run a vncviewer on the local machine. Be sure to use the commandswitches below which give better performance.

$ vncviewer -compresslevel 9 -encodings "tight copyrect" localhost:1

Now have your field person also create a ssh port tunnel (of coursethey need an account on the demo system as well) and also runvncviewer. Now both of you can control the keyboard and mouse for thesystem. The performance can be surprisingly good if you have a leastT1 speeds. Across a slower DSL, it is usable, but you feel the delay.

I work for a company that has firewall that only allow out http, https and most importantly, ssh. While at my desk I want to check mail home IMAP4 mail, VNC to our lab systems on an external network, check in on an IRC chat room or even surf to some sites that I don't want corporate IM to know about. (I'm not talking porn, but the nanny software frequently blocks sites as 'hacker sites' like the nmap site which I do have a business reason to be viewing. Ugh.)

Then I configure my mail client to connect to localhost:1234 for IMAP, chat client to use localhost:6667 and web browsers to use localhost:8080 for proxy. Just so I don't have to go reconfigure all the apps that need to use a proxy (mozilla, netscape, galeon, konqueror, Ximian's red-carpet, Red Hat's up2date, nautilus and various command line apps that use http_proxy like debian's apt-get, etc) they always use 'localhost:8080' for the web proxy. When I want to switch back to using the corporate firewall, I run this instead:

Tuesday, April 2, 2002

First connect to the demo system and start a href="http://www.uk.research.att.com/vnc/">vncserver runningthere. If you are already logged in, simply vncserver. Or befancy and do this from your desktop: ssh your@demo.labsystem.netvncserver

Now run a vncviewer on the local machine. Be sure to use the commandswitches below which give better performance.

$ vncviewer -compresslevel 9 -encodings "tight copyrect" localhost:1

Now have your field person also create a ssh port tunnel (of coursethey need an account on the demo system as well) and also runvncviewer. Now both of you can control the keyboard and mouse for thesystem. The performance can be surprisingly good if you have a leastT1 speeds. Across a slower DSL, it is usable, but you feel the delay.